?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800
ELLA BERGMANN-MICHEL (1896-1972)
Film von Sündenfall zu Basel. Pen and ink with colored pencil on Japan paper laid down on canvas with acrylic ground. 155x130 mm; 6 1/4x5 inches. Initialed and dated in ink, lower right recto and inscribed in ink and with the artist's "Heimatmuseum of Modern Art" ink stamp on the frame back. 1962.
Provenance: Artist's estate, from the artist's daughter, Ella Rautenberg.
Born in Paderborn, Germany, Bergmann-Michel was an early espouser of Constructivism. She started making collages by 1915 and from 1917-20 studied at the Weimar Hochschule für Bildenden Kunste under the German painter Walther Klemm (1893-1957). Throughout her career, she introduced innovations to the collage medium, including incorporating poetry and being among the first artists to utilize photography. Together with her husband, Robert Michel (1897-1983), she became known as a pioneer of using photographs in collage. In 1920, the couple moved to Vockenhausen, near Frankfurt, Germany, where she continued her work in photo-collages and ink drawings in the Constructivist style, however, during World War II her artistic output waned until the political climate was safer for her to continue to make and promote abstract art.
